“No man is an island ... any man’s death diminishes me,” wrote the poet
John Donne back in 1624. Some 350 years later, the engineer Robert Metcalfe
formulated his Metcalfe’s Law that describes how the value of a network
grows rapidly with each new node. A telephone or a human, it’s our
interconnectedness that enriches us. Just ask a poet or an engineer.
Or a linguist.

Language shows our common humanity. About half of the world’s population
speaks languages that came from the same parent language (we call it
Proto-Indo-European). Languages as different as English, Farsi, German,
Hindi, Irish, and Spanish came from the same parent.

Ultimately, we are all related.

Leave it to opportunist politicians to use trumped-up accusations to divide
people into us vs. them.

This week we’ll see five miscellaneous words, each of which adds to the
richness of the language.

“The agreement last month of Syria’s traditionally factious and fractious
three million Kurds to put aside their differences and form the Kurdish
National Council has alarmed neighbouring Turkey.”
Jonathan Manthorpe; Arab Spring Awakens Kurdish Dreams of Autonomy;
The Vancouver Sun (Canada); Aug 3, 2012.